Presentation Outline/Summary
Concepts of learning held by students

It is widely believed that everyone maintains the same concepts of learning, but no two people think the same and therefore no two people hold the same concepts of learning. A deep learner will not hold the same concepts of learning as a surface learner and vice versa, it is because of this difference in their concepts of learning, which will make someone either a surface learner or a deep learner. According to Saljo there are actually five concepts of learning, those being : Quantitative increase in knowledge, memorizing facts, acquiring facts and methods, abstracting meaning and an interpretive process aimed at understanding reality.

Saljo came to this conclusion by interviewing a combination of teenagers and adults, all with varying levels of education, they were asked to describe their own learning experiences and techniques, as well as their own ideas of what learning is. Through their answers to the questions that they were asked, Saljo found a pattern that brought forth five distinct concepts of learning held by students. This was then verified by a man named Amendeo Giorgi, who at the time was doing similar material on phenomenological psychology. The five concepts of learning distinctly split people into two well-known categories, those being that of a deep learner and surface learner. To show you how this is so I will be breaking the five concepts up into their corresponding groups and will as be giving a little information on each of the five concepts of learning.

The first concept of learning being the quantitative increase in knowledge is the idea of accumulation of knowledge, of filling ones head with facts. This points to learning as being seen as knowledge in the form of facts and information. The second concept being that of memorising facts, this is the concept that one must learn the required information for exams and then reproduce it, to achieve whatever is necessary in order to pass and this is all, once done the information is then disposable. Thirdly is the acquiring facts and methods, this concept is similar to that of the memorising concept, but this concept takes in information and then see how that information could be used, it turns the information around and makes use of it in other ways. With that being said this brings us to the end of the first group of concepts, and as you can see these concepts correspond with learner commonly known as surface learners. That being said the other two